The Western powers urged Iran on Friday at the United Nations to fulfill three key conditions in order to postpone their threat of reimposing UN sanctions, according to Reuters.
E3 Offer
UN envoys for Britain, France and Germany released a joint statement ahead of a closed-door UN Security Council meeting. This statement came a day after triggering a 30-day process to reinstate UN sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear program.
“We urge Iran to reconsider this position, to reach an agreement based on our offer, and to help create the space for a diplomatic solution to this issue for the long term,” Britain’s UN Ambassador Barbara Woodward said, with her German and French counterparts standing next to her.
Meanwhile, Iran’s UN Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani described the E3 offer as “full of unrealistic preconditions”.
Iravani also told reporters that the European powers are setting conditions that ought to be the result of negotiations, not prerequisites, underscoring that these requirements cannot be met.
Moreover, he said that they should instead support “a brief, unconditional technical extension of Resolution 2231,” the measure that underpins the 2015 nuclear agreement, which lifted UN and Western sanctions on Iran in return for restrictions on its nuclear activities.
Russia and China’s Proposal
On the contrary, Russia and China have put forward a draft UN Security Council resolution calling for a six-month extension of the 2015 nuclear agreement and urging all parties to immediately return to the negotiating table. However, they have not yet requested a vote.
In response, Iravani hailed the Russian and Chinese draft resolution as a practical measure to give diplomacy more time.
But the adoption of this proposal would require at least nine votes and no vetoes from any of the five permanent Security Council members — the US, France, Britain, China, or Russia.
The speculation about Tehran’s nuclear program has been increasing since Israel bombed Iranian nuclear facilities on June 13.
The US became directly involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran on June 22 after launching airstrikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities in Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan.
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